Quintessentially Scottish and endlessly appealing, Edinburgh is one of Europe's most beguiling destinations.

That impossible skyline of castle and crag is positively theatrical – small wonder the city plays host to the world’s largest artistic happening, the Edinburgh International Festival. Whatever the time of year, Edinburgh is simply one of the great capitals of Europe, an integral part of the Scottish experience.

Being in Edinburgh is being at the centre of things Scottish. It’s also being aware that here is a city where things have always been done in a certain way.

From the crack of the One o’clock Gun, a daily timecheck echoing out over Princes Street gardens, to the daily stroll of the penguins at Edinburgh Zoo, a strong sense of tradition prevails. Those grand New Town 18th-century facades, that sense of living history in the Old Town's Royal Mile, that indefinable air which Edinburgh has carried with it since the city’s intellectual renaissance in the 18th century.

Yet there is another side to The City.

Hand in hand with respectable Edinburgh is a darker and more romantic aspect. You catch it in tales of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, or of Deacon Brodie, the respectable citizen by day and thief at night, who inspired Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There is still a hint of it in Leith, Edinburgh's seaport, which has undergone its own renaissance and now offers some of the city’s finest pubs and eating places, yet has never quite lost that racy air and that sense of daring which clings to old harbour-fronts.

If you are about to visit Edinburgh the following link may also be of interest:
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Somewhere to stay